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GIMP Not Enough for Linux Users?
nursegirl writes "Novell has been running a survey about apps that people need in order to convert their data centers or desktops to Linux. The online survey has been running since Jan 13, and Adobe Photoshop was at the top of the list as of February 1. Desktoplinux.com has an interesting article about why the existence of the GIMP isn't enough for many professionals."
As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop. More frustrating, however, is having to compile my own plugins. I still have not managed to compile one successfully (and I've been working with Linux since Red Hat 7.3).
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
GIMP is cool, a bit unixy but for a novice it accomplishes much the same as more expensive programs. The thing I'm most missing on my desktop is Irfanview. How to move hundreds of pics from digicam to the computer, crop and rename? GIMP is very unsuitable for this task. Heard it's possible to get Irfanview to run on WINE, though, but a native solution would always be nicer.
I can easily say that the newer versions of Photoshop dwarf the competition. I specifically focus on restoration and cleanup of old photographs, and this is where Photoshop excels. Photoshop's layout seems much more straightforward, and its utilities more accessible and versatile than those in GIMP.
People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.
It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.
As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Why not have a nice tabbed interface?
Also the name sucks. At best its confusing, at worst its offensive.
Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years?
The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?
On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
You just demonstrated that you don't understand the "big problem" with color management. Formal color management is about reconciling various RGB and CMYK color spaces in a perceptually consistent way (i.e., transforming monitor color to printer color), and has nearly nothing to do with licensing. Spot colors like PANTONE are a very small subset of the domain of color management.
One of the main reasons people don't care about GIMP, isn't just the questionably poor usability. It's still the features. Last time I check, things such as the ability to group layers, advanced typographical control, adjustable object effects, and color modes, were still far behind Photoshop.
Even in photography, I still find the GIMP lacking. The lack of LAB mode, which I often use, is one example.
The GIMP is a good project, and it sure has it's uses, but it's still far away from a Photoshop replacment for many people. It's like saying that MySQL is a suitable replacment for Oracles's top-of-the-line DB. For some; sure, for others; no F'n way.
But look at who they're surveying... These folks will NEVER use Linux no matter what. I'm a 24/7 Linux user myself and I know that for a fact. The main reason why is that with the possible exception of Apple's Mac OS X, Unix is not something that Joe and Jane Average can work with. The main reason being that if you want to do interesting things in Unix, you MUST be exposed to the shell and some form of scripting or (gasp!) programming. Sure, that works fine for me and a lot of other folks. And people like us can dumb a Linux distro down enough for grandma to use it. But, in doing that we also wind up having to support our creation. I know. I've done it. My wife and my parents (previously all computerphobes) are now Linux users. It is possible to make a Linux system easy enough for someone who knows nothing about computers to use. It's a lot harder to make Linux work for someone who actually has some inkling of what they want to do, but aren't quite at the level reqiured to just make it work with custom scripting/coding.
I see GIMP in relation to Photoshop in the same way that the old Syntrillium CoolEdit (a Windows audio editor) was to Digidesign's ProTools. CoolEdit was arguably much more powerful in terms of features. It was also far more scientific with special filters that appealed to egg heads more than audio designers. But if you asked a ProTools fan to work with CoolEdit, they'd curl up and die. The main reason is that ProTools lack of abilities is what made it easy for them to use. In the same way, GIMP throws a lot more features/filters at the user than Photoshop in it's default configuration. Those extra features are confusing to people who are used to Photoshop. I made the transition from Photoshop to GIMP right around the time that PS 3.5 was out. I'd say that currently GIMP does everything that Photoshop 3.5 did and more. The UI took some getting used to, but once I was used to it, it did everything I needed. Still... that doesn't help people who don't want to have to get used to something. It's a sad truth simply because they could better themselves if they put the effort in, but most people simply don't want to.
You know that if Photoshop or Dreamweaver were ported to Linux that people wouldn't leave their current platforms. There isn't much that Linux offers them immediately, so why would they do it? Again, another sad truth is that many people don't have enough of a long term view to see how much they'd save in both OS upgrade costs and hardware costs. Most folks aren't smart enough to realize that if they switched to Linux, they wouldn't have to pay for upgrades. However, more importantly, they don't realize that they could hold onto their machines a while longer because the newer versions of Linux rarely push you off of your current hardware onto the latest and greatest. I've got a box that will hit ten years old next year and it's running the latest apps I need (GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, BIND, Wine, eDonkey2000, GAIM, GRdesktop, VNC, RealPlayer 10, Xine 1.x, MPlayer, Grip, Rio Karma Music Manager Lite, Icecast/Ices etc...). Not only that, but it's supporting five simultaneous users all doing similar things. I challenge anyone to take a nine year old Mac or Windows box and run the latest OS and apps on them. But this is something that most people don't even realize is possible. They've been conditioned to believe that they need new machines every couple of years. That'show bad it is in the computer industry right now. I don't see it getting any better either. As soon as people want to make money with this stuff they will stop at nothing to convince you you need to buy more stuff. In perpetuity.
So, I don't expect to see the average person running Linux anytime soon. Anyone who does is being foolish. But this is not due to failings in the Linux distros, the core of open source itself, or even the GIMP project. It's due to the failing of our society to educate people enough to actually understand the tools they work with day in an
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Thanks. That was a bloody good laugh. If you'd wanted to prove you have no clue about real world colour management and are, in your own words, a 'moron', then congratulations - you just passed with flying colours.
Seriously, learn something about the subject before you spout off.
As a starter for ten, show us your RGB -> CMYK and vice versa conversion functions, if they're "just the inverse".
Hint - consider the information lost when converting from CMYK to RGB. If that's too taxing, think about the Key component.
(Supplementary question - Photoshop is largely a bitmap editing application - guess how many people edit bitmaps by defining the Pantone colour used for each pixel. As other people have said, Pantone is a small part of the equation.)
Well... I'm an artist (musician primarily). That's why I got into working with computers. It's only natural that as a musician/photographer/graphic artist, I'd want to get to know more about my instrument (the computer). So learning to create music/edit photos/create original images with computers spilled over into gaining knowledge about networking, Bash scripting, compiling from source, etc... Oddly, it seems that I'm an exception. But I don't think I'm all that different from the average person. I think most people are capable of doing this stuff. They just don't realize it and don't really have (as you said) the time to put into it. Which is still a failing of society. Our time is taken up by way too many things that should be handled by competent infrastructure.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's odd, isn't it.
Fact: Many users have experience with Photoshop and the GIMP.
Fact: Most of those users find Photoshop's UI to be vastly superior, or at least the GIMP's UI to be vastly inferior.
Fact: Those in charge of the GIMP dismiss such experienced users in the field as feeble-minded ignoramuses.
My $1,000,000,000 prediction: this comment will be just as applicable 3 years from now.
Don't Hate, Gestate
I'm a pretty advanced Photoshop user - I use it for both print and digital purposes and I've been doing so for over 10 years now. I like Linux and I'd really like to be able to switch to a Linux desktop completely one day. That said I'm giving GIMP a try every once in a while. People say it rocks once you clear the Photoshop mist and once you get familiar with the somewhat weird GUI you'll find it, well, awesome.
My conclusion so far is that while GIMP has a Photoshop resembling toolset it's really not a Photoshop competitor. Really. While Photoshop is overkill for John Doe, especially regarding the price (yeah, most people pirate it, I know), GIMP is quite sufficient. It's an awesome tool for removing red eyes in photos, fixing resolutions, brightness/contrast and stuff like that - but it's not competing with Photoshop. It's obviously not made for print due to the lack of CMYK-support, and for web production.. well, compare Photoshops "Save for web"-module vs GIMP's "Select a JPEG compression percentage please"-prompt.
I've seen work by one or two people who do some seriously impressing stuff with GIMP - and that's it. Those two people also seem to have been involved in the GIMP project since the dawn of mankind, might be a good indicator on how much time you need to spend before being able to use it fluently enough.
Some people who doesn't work with graphics professionally (or claim GIMPs awesomeness without even using it) will probably disagree with me and claim that I'm wrong. But hey, at least I've TRIED to use it. It's just completely pointless for me to even spend time with it when I have access to a (legal) Photoshop license. I don't think the GIMP project is useless though, as I said - it's good enough for the average guy, even though I think the UI could improve tremendeously.
www.freshpilot.com
As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop.
You mean stuff like resizing the brush with a keypress? After reading the manual, going to google, setting any arcanely named binding that might be it in the shortcuts preferences, the Gimp just sits there and stares stubbornly at me when I try it. Do these people never paint anything? OTOH, this is the same people that think that CTRL-K is much more logical for deleteing stuff than say, oh, I don't know... delete, maybe?
Apart from that, a lot of why the Gimp is such a struggle to use is those right click menus and image menus that the Gimp people are so proud of because they can do anything. Sure, they can do anything - but it also lists *everything*, always! It's called a context menu, and it could be incredibly powerful if it had any context. Oh, and things sorted in real categories.
I could very well live without a Photoshop interface, but I want a human interface.
Spine World
The mailing lists don't just have the developers biting at each other, but some of the higher up gimp people biting at users and potential users. I dared to compare a feature of Photoshop's clone tool with one on GIMP, and wished for some of the photoshop-like functionality on the gimp, and gimp's resident defender Carol started on with the nasty emails. It was six repetitive emails abusing me, my relationships with women, abusing me for being a control freak and how, by insisting gimp wasn't good enough, I was calling all gimp users morons for using substandard software and she wouldn't stand for that. That's borderline stalking behaviour.
What happened 3 months later? My graphic designer gf got exactly the same treatment in email off list for asking how to do something in gimp that she could do in photoshop, except carol added in the accusation that she could only afford photoshop if she's sleeping with the boss so she didn't have time to speak to people like her. That didn't stop her sending another couple of abusive emails.
This is an open source software mailing list, not a vicious political shitfight where nobody's allowed to question or suggest the slightest thing is wrong with Gimp. Works more like the latter from my experience.
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.
Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.
Carol is not representative for the GIMP developers. The last time we heard about her sending such mails off-list, we asked her to stop it and were told that it wouldn't happen again. If it did indeed happen again (as you said), I would like you to report this incident and show evidence for it (but please not here on slashdot). If your claims are true, then it is probably about time that Carol gets her gimp.org mail address and web space revoked. We have been hesitant to do that until now because she is often very helpful and the content of carol.gimp.org is a very good resource for GIMP users. But her attitude towards some people on the mailing-list is indeed inacceptable and I am afraid that she is doing more harm than good.
Sorry mate, I use UNIX every day, to run really big serious programs costing tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing. I do it from the GUI. Sure, I occasionally type in real hard to understand commands like 'mdi', or 'dtfile' into the command line, but mostly it is just me and that big old boring HP UNIX GUI. The longest batch file I've ever written has 3 lines.
Elitism such as yours is both misplaced and counter productive. There is no really hard reason why a Knoppix type system, and a bit of fine tuning, would not make a consumer level OS. The problem is not the underlying OS, the problem is at the GUI level, and as such is solvable by scripting at the VB level.
We have realized this a long time ago and have discussed it several times. But a mailing-list is a public place. You don't throw someone out of a public place just because you don't like him/her. Especially not if he/she is also often being helpful and he/she is one of the few people who are actually contributing to the project. It is a difficult situation but at some point it needs to be dealt with. That's why I was asking for evidence so that we can bring it up again if needed.
Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.
Speaking of spamming: for about the 1,000,000th time, Here's the CMYK plug-ins for Gimp. Yeah, one of those non-existant plug-ins the ignorant jackass in the TFA asserts do not exist for Gimp.
Incidentally, I just happened to have refuted the inaccuracies in the TFA here. Perhaps you can point some of these out to others in this forum? Or add to them over time? I, too, have experience with both (as well as with MGI-photosuite, Macintosh Draw, Windows Paintbrush, xfig, and Corel Draw, and more I've probably forgotten), and am absolutely baffled at how so much flat-out Bull gets spread about one little program. I'm getting to where I have a pet theory that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is the source of all of it!
But anyway, you being a user of both, I would highly value any input you could provide in the comments sections of my blog's tutorials (scroll down the menu on the left, they're there). I'm fine with porting Photoshop. I'm *not* fine with the mythology going around.